Join the show exploring Romania’s sci-fi love affair

A new exhibition is exploring the history of Romania’s sci-fi fandoms.

Displaying posters, objects, maps, sculptures, and drawings, Bucharest show New TEMPOralities: the Xenogeneses of SF traces Romanians’ love for science fiction back to the 1950s, when the country’s Science and Technology newspaper launched a much-loved, long-lived sci-fi magazine, publishing stories twice a month.

“The idea for the show came to me thanks to a puzzle I’ve been trying to solve since the early 90s,” one of the exhibition’s co-curators, Ștefan Tiron, told The Calvert Journal. “I was watching coverage of the Mineriads (a series of miners’ protests, which spilled over into violent clashes) on TV. A journalist asked the miners about their demands, and one of them said: ‘I came so that they’d give us another episode of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future on TV’. We tried looking this news bulletin up in the archives, but we couldn’t find it.”

Dozens of literary sci-fi clubs spread across socialist Romania between the late 60s and the 90s. For co-curator Ștefan Tiron, Romanians’ love of sci-fi has roots both in the desire to escape everyday reality, and as a continuation of the socialist ideology, with its emphasis on technology and a bright future.

The exhibition also pushes back the boundaries of sci-fi fandom, displaying low-budget machinery made by small-town inventors, or examples of “low tech hacking”. “This was our response to the ‘billionaires in space’: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos,” says Tiron. One such example is Bani Gheață (which means “cash”, but translates as “ice money” ad litteram). The installation by Centrul Dialectic (Mihai Lukacs and Bogdan Popa) retells the story of Romanian migrants in Germany in the 90s, who used beer caps filled with ice instead of the paid tokens they needed to use the heaters in their accommodation.